Joint Conference of the Käte Hamburger Centres, hosted by the Käte Hamburger Centre for Advanced Study “Law as Culture” in Bonn
Globality seems to permeate all cultures and social spheres today. It is both widely accepted and individually adapted in numerous disciplines - largely without regard to theoretical preferences -, by political actors and in various regions of the world. Globalization offers new perspectives of research and interpretation to many academic disciplines, but it also confronts them with enormous conceptual, theoretical and methodological challenges. The pressure on our own familiar research routines and knowledge systems appears to be mounting. The consequence is an unprecedented agitation within the humanities and cultural sciences.
Yet which new insights can be gained by orienting our units of analysis and research designs "globally" or opening them up to "global" challenges? What more do we see if we extend our cultural scientific gaze transnationally in our theory and methodology? What consequences does this entail for our own semantic habits and concepts, familiar to us from our own disciplines? Or is it true, as sometimes demanded, that, with a view to global developmental dynamics, we should remove the fixation on "methodological nationalism" from our basic concepts and methodological approaches and learn to conceive them anew in the framework of "methodological cosmopolitanism"? The first joint conference of all Käte Hamburger Kollegs seeks to address these questions.
